The Next 7979 Years

Everything seems to be going faster… with fast food, ever faster computers, internet speeds and deliveries, we really do seem to be in a hurry. ‘Now’ is gone when the word is said. The people of The Long Now, created in 1996, are trying to stretch that out a bit. The objective is to stretch the present, the ‘now.’

Brian Ellis, co-founder of The Long Now, described its 10,000-year clock project and is encouraging us to think in millennia instead of in short election cycles, with its ‘now’ that is just the actual contact point where past and future seconds meet. He wanted us to see the then current year as part of these ten millennia and record it as 02021. Explaining his reasoning, Ellis said, “When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”

Thinking like his is about much more than a clock. The Slow Food movement is another way of looking at the need to stretch the ‘now.’ Megan Stubblefield, an environmental scientist and policy expert, describes it this way: “The slow food movement is a global initiative focused on encouraging people to stop eating fast food, instead taking the time to prepare and eat whole, locally-sourced foods. The focus is not only on nutrition, but also on preserving culture and heritage as it relates to food.” Some of us grow our own food – it is good for the environment, but that environment extends to our understanding of cycles, taste buds and gut biome. When I taste some new food or herb now, I look forward to tasting it again once I figure out how to grow it. With our gardens and our pace of life, I no longer wonder which grocer carries it. Indigenous time is described as circular, a ‘long now.’ Every generation must plan seven generations forward, and that implies appreciating seven generations back.

The consequences of our fast-paced ‘now,’ captured in the second between the past and the future, include the impact it has on our social memory. For example, as a society, we had virtually forgotten about the Spanish flu epidemic, and at the time of the Montreal smallpox epidemic of 1885, the huge anti-vax movement had forgotten that their ancestors, two generations earlier, had stopped smallpox cold by accepting vaccination. In the plague of 1885, the anti-vaxxers were responsible for the death of over 3000 people in the small city – a dubious distinction. Montreal had to be quarantined from the rest of North America. Facts like these should be a part of our ‘now’ and at our fingertips. Thus, when we hear people claim all kinds of plots and lies about their governments, their information can be considered in the context of that longer ‘now.’

How do we remain aware of our own time, the current generation including seven generations back and seven generations forward? To me, the very first step is to remind ourselves when things go wrong that, not too far back, things went well – and conversely, when everything is going well, temper the satisfaction with the memory that in our own experience, not long ago, everything seemed to be going wrong. By conditioning ourselves with such an exercise, slowly our own minds will extend and expand beyond ourselves to our social experience, even beyond our own lives. One does not have to be a historian but simply self-aware. Each of our minds is overwhelmingly beautiful, intricate, and capable of seeing beyond and before.

If you are looking for ways to expand the ‘now,’ learning a bit about our history can help. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography is a good resource. Be careful not to get too lost in it… each of the people mentioned in one short biography is linked to others. For example, if your great-grand-uncle is written up, you will likely find his worst rival in the same story, and you can go read that person’s story too. Since it is hard to have no slant in writing about history, you will find that one contributor’s hero can be another contributor’s antagonist.

CBC’s Massey Lectures is another. I recently listened to Ursula Franklin talking about technology and was so fascinated by her insights that I read a reprint of her 1989 lectures, with four chapters added ten years later. In it, she described the internet, not as the wonderful Information Highway people thought it would be in 1999, but as the Information Junkyard it has become some 20 years after she foresaw it. She was 79 years old and, as a respected elder, she could even explain why that would happen: She said it creates asynchronicity, no sense of order in time, and no proper references. She did not discuss the Long Now, which had been created during that same half-decade, but she was clearly concerned about the damage that the internet could cause to our understanding of time and of the proper order of the world.

The Massey Lectures are an annual event. They began in 1961 and have included John Kenneth Galbraith, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Lewis and Tanya Talaga. Each speaker addresses their subject in their ‘now,’ and listening to any one of these talks helps us understand how long our ‘now’ can be, how we can live in a larger present moment and gain insight and the stability to help us navigate through the next 07979 years of the clock’s ten millennium timepiece.